Robert Caro considers political power in new audio production

It's been a little more than five years since Robert Caro published the fourth volume in his epic biography of President Lyndon Johnson. He's working on the next installment — each book has taken roughly seven years, and he says this one is no different: "I never want to feel rushed. ... It'll be done when it's done."

But that apparently won't be soon. When asked if this volume — one that's been billed as the final volume — feels different as he draws the story of Johnson's life to a close, the 81-year-old Caro says, "I'm not close enough to the end to start feeling it yet. I'm still just buried in it."

So the fans who've already consumed the 4,700-odd pages that Caro has written on Johnson and his earlier subject, Robert Moses, will have to wait a bit longer. In the meantime, Caro offers a treat: a nearly two-hour audio recording called "On Power."

Released earlier this year by Audible, the production grew out of a talk Caro presented last year at an event celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Pulitzer Prize, a series of discussions presented by Harvard University's Nieman Foundation for Journalism.

The Tribune spoke with Caro earlier this year by phone. The conversation was marked by Caro's habit of editing himself as he speaks, doubling back at times to explain more precisely or to spell names. The following is a transcript of the conversation, edited for space and clarity.

Q: How did you come to write about power?

A: We think that power in a democracy comes from our votes and the ballot box and from being elected, and here was a guy (Robert Moses) who was never elected to anything and he had more power than anyone who was elected. More than any mayor, more than any governor, more than any mayor or governor combined. And he held this power for 44 years, and I had no idea — and neither did anybody else — where he got this power. I said, you know if I could find out, because I didn't know, and explain to people the source of his power, I'd be saying something not about what we learn about political power or governmental power in textbooks, but more about what's the reality of power.

Q: What do you think is the most common misunderstanding about how political power works?

A: The lack of understanding of how political power affects everybody's lives in so many ways every day. Like with this health care thing. In the book that I'm writing now, Lyndon Johnson has just passed Medicare. It had been on the table since Franklin Roosevelt, really. Then Harry Truman introduced what we would call Medicare today. And Johnson says the night after the assassination (of President John F. Kennedy) — he can't sleep. They fly back to Washington that night, and he goes to bed, but he can't sleep. So he asked three of his aides to come and sit around the bed while he talks, and among the things he says is, I'm gonna pass Harry Truman's — I forget what he calls it — but I'm going to pass Harry Truman's health bill for him.

And so you say, OK, so many people are coming to understand how government action affects their health care, but it affects you in so many other ways. If you're a soldier and you're sent to Iraq or Afghanistan and you're killed or wounded, that's an example of political power. Just like under Lyndon Johnson — Vietnam — where we had such an immense toll of Americans. That was political power. But it also affects things in transportation. Robert Moses really condemned New York to be tied to the automobile for decades, maybe centuries to come. In New York, it's not uncommon for people here to commute an hour and a half by car each day or even two hours each way. That's like, what, 15 or 20 hours a week. If government stepped in and provided a good mass transit system, you'd have let's say 20 hours a week more to do what? Anything you want — to play with your kids, to read. It would change your lives.

Q: Getting people to understand that, though, requires someone who can translate the inner workings of politics in a compelling way on the page. Can you talk about your approach to the craft of writing?

A: The quality of the writing matters as much in nonfiction as it does in fiction, but that's not sufficiently understood. I think you need the same things in nonfiction that you need in fiction. For example, a sense of place: You have to make the readers see the room. You can say, "Lyndon Johnson was so great at working the senate cloakroom." Well, what does that mean? So I tried to paint the picture by talking to senators who he did persuade of things in the cloakroom. What was it like for Lyndon Johnson to be trying to persuade you? And then you learn about how (Johnson would) sit there listening until he felt he knew or he seemed to know what you really wanted or what you really were afraid of, and he'd play on that. But more than that, what was it like when he put his arm around you and grabbed your lapel? And what was the Senate floor like? And what was the Texas Hill Country like?

You can say Lyndon Johnson revolutionized the lives of hundreds of thousands of people by bringing them electricity, but that's not really enough. You have to make people see as they're reading. You have to make your readers feel for themselves how hard lives were without electricity, how lonely and isolated and impoverished their lives were before Lyndon Johnson. That was why I said to (my wife) Ina, we're not understanding this area, these people, and therefore I'm not really understanding either Lyndon Johnson or the magnitude of what he accomplished, so we're going to have to live there until I get it. We actually lived (in the Texas Hill Country) for most of three years. We always went home in the summer, but we were there for eight or nine months a year for three years. At the end of it, I tried to paint a picture of Texas Hill Country and what the lives of women were like, so you really see how he transformed them.

You need a sense of rhythm. In my second book, you have a scene where (Johnson is) running against a very popular ex-governor of Texas. He's hospitalized with kidney stones, he gets out, he's so far behind someone gives him the idea of traveling around Texas in a helicopter. It's 1948, so it'll be a real novelty. No one's ever seen a helicopter, so when he flies into a little town, he'll get a big crowd. But then you say, well, that's great, but this chapter is about desperation, his desperation to win. I have a lamp in front of me on my desk and I Scotch-taped an index card, and on the index card, I wrote, Is there desperation on this page? Do the rhythms show desperation? The writing matters.

Q: These are factual biographies, though, so it's not like fiction where you can fill in what you don't know. How do you get people to tell you what you need to know to create those pictures?

A: If you were sitting next to me when I do an interview you'd hear me say a lot, "If I was sitting there next to you in the Oval Office, say, what would I see?" It's hard to pull it out of them. They just say something like, "Well, Lyndon Johnson was" — and you've gotta say, "Well, what chair was he in? What chair was the other guy in? Who else was in the room? What was the atmosphere?" If you ask people over and over, things come out. Very often they get angry at me, because I ask the same question: "What would I be seeing? What did you see?"

I just wrote a scene like this. In 1965, when Martin Luther King Jr. is marching in Selma, and George Wallace comes up — and he's an adamant segregationist — and Johnson wants him to do certain things … as governor that he doesn't want to do. And by the time it's over, Johnson persuades him to do it. When (Wallace) comes out, the press is there and Wallace says, "God, if I was talking to him for five more minutes, he would've had me coming out for civil rights." So I was talking to George Reedy, who's Johnson's press secretary, and I kept asking him (about it) and I remember Reedy got ang ... — you know, he said, "I answered that already," but I kept asking it and I finally said, "Well, what was it about the two of them?" And he said, "Well, you know Johnson was really towering over him." So I said, "Yeah, I know Johnson was a lot taller," and he said, "That's not all." He said Johnson had the two couches in the Oval Office and Johnson had the stuffing removed from their cushions so that when you sat down on it, as Wallace did, you sunk further to the floor. Johnson sat in a rocking chair that was higher than them so that he would be towering over them, even more so. Isn't that great? You can picture that, and it's not unimportant.

Q: What do you think Johnson would've thought of your portrayal?

A: He never liked anything that was written about him, so I don't imagine he'd like these books. On the other hand, to whatever extent they succeed in showing how he did it, I think he would not be unhappy that someone was telling the world how he did it and showing this political genius that he had.

Q: Do you have any thoughts about whether Johnson could exist in today's political climate?

A: Could I just say something about this on power? You asked me what was the genesis of this was. What was so great for me was that it gave me a chance to remember things that I had long forgotten really. I learned something about myself when I was a reporter on the New Brunswick paper. I was driving around on Election Day with a political boss for whom I was working and I got to this place at a polling booth where they were herding African-Americans into paddy wagons because they had been objecting to something that was going on at polls. And I suddenly realized I didn't want to be in that big car with him. I wanted to be out there with them, and all I did was I that got out of the car and went back to being a reporter (and) started looking for a crusading newspaper.

So this (project) gave me a chance to remember things that I learned about myself and it gave me a chance to remember things I learned about power. … You can't just talk about how power is wielded. It's hard to find out how it's wielded — you have to do that first — but then you also have to find out the effect of power on those on whom it is wielded. Like the farmers on Long Island whose lives Robert Moses needlessly destroyed. Or the neighborhoods in New York that he needlessly destroyed by running highways right through the middle of them when there were alternate routes available. Or how power can really change people's lives for the better, like the people of the Hill Country.

Q: Do you see lessons in those things for people today?

A: It's very important for America to know as much as possible about political power, about how it really works. Not what we're taught in textbooks, but the raw, naked realities of power. It's very important, because in a democracy, ultimately power comes from the ballot box, from us. So the more we know about political power, the more informed our votes will be, and therefore, theoretically, hopefully, the better our democracy will be. That's really the key thing to me.

Jennifer Day is the Tribune's books editor.

'On Power'

By Robert A. Caro, narrated by Caro, Audible, 1:42

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